| Maine voters will go to the polls tomorrow to select their Senate nominees. There is little suspense. Five-term incumbent Susan Collins is running unopposed for the Republican nomination. Since outgoing Maine Governor Janet Mills ended her flailing campaign, Graham Platner has been the presumptive Democratic nominee, as he faces no serious competition. Because Maine is key to Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate in a midterm election year when the president is very unpopular but the map favors Republicans, the race has garnered considerable attention. |
| Unfortunately for Democrats, much of the attention has been negative, focusing on Platner’s personal shortcomings. These include a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest that appears to be a Nazi-style Totenkopf, since-deleted Reddit comments that were sexist, homophobic, and arguably racist, and most recently, revelations that Platner exchanged sexually explicit text messages with multiple women other than his wife as well as allegations that he was an abusive boyfriend in multiple pre-marital relationships. |
| Platner has responded to the various concerns about his personal behavior with a mix of regret, excuse, and denial. He has claimed not to have known what his tattoo meant when he got it as a drunken young man nearly two decades ago. He has attributed his Reddit comments and other embarrassing statements and conduct to a combination of youthful immaturity and the difficulties he faced adjusting to civilian life after three tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and one as a member of the Army National Guard in Afghanistan. And he has dismissed the latest round of allegations from ex-girlfriends as politically motivated. |
| That dismissal has at least superficial plausibility with respect to claims by Lyndsey Fifield, who is a conservative activist. However, the New York Times story describing Platner’s “unsettling” behavior was based on accounts by other women as well, one of whom was expressly identified as a Democrat. |
| Platner’s personal flaws thus threaten to undercut what might have been a triumphant candidacy based on his many virtues. In an era when general election voters appear uninspired by establishment candidates of either party, Platner is a young left-leaning populist outsider focused on pocketbook issues such as healthcare, housing affordability, and the corrupting influence of money on politics. But for the controversies that have dogged his campaign, he ought to be precisely the kind of candidate Democrats need to win back the white working class in a state with the whitest voting population of any in the country. |
| Platner may yet succeed. As a very long-serving incumbent, Collins is a vulnerable target for voter frustration in what, despite its racial homogeneity, is a bluish purplish state. Although Collins is among the least consistently conservative Republicans in the Senate and has occasionally voted against President Trump’s agenda and nominees, she is also notorious for her hand-wringing expression of “concerns” while supporting the GOP party line. General election polls show Platner leading Collins, albeit by a small and narrowing margin. |
| Should Democrats Hold Their Noses? |
| Ideally, Democrats would have another option besides Platner, someone who combined his progressive platform and the inspirational aspects of his personal story without the disturbing episodes and undertones. |
| If Mills had not dropped out of the race, she might have been a better choice. Whether she would have been a weaker general-election candidate than Platner is difficult to know. As a substantially older establishment figure with a centrist record, she would have held less appeal for progressives than Platner holds, but she also lacks his personal baggage. And with Trump widely unpopular, she was prepared to run a strong campaign contrasting her notorious clash with the president over federal funding with Collins’s support for key Trump initiatives. |
| However, Platner is essentially guaranteed to secure the Democratic nomination and extremely unlikely to step down in favor of a party-chosen substitute. In the general election, the only meaningful votes will be cast for Collins or Platner. |
| How should Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents respond? In some sense, a suboptimal choice is all one ever has. After all, for a thoughtful voter, no candidate is perfect. A libertarian-leaning voter might favor the Republican’s views about taxes and regulation but the Democrat’s views on social issues. Even voters who are more closely aligned with their party’s platform overall will find that no candidate fully ticks every box. A sensible voter chooses a viable candidate closest to their overall mix of policy preferences. |
| But what if a candidate runs on a platform that aligns reasonably well with a voter’s policy views but has demonstrated character flaws? Even then, most voters will and arguably should overlook quite a lot. Donald Trump is a useful, if extreme, example. |
| When he first ran for president in 2016 after securing the Republican nomination, many socially conservative voters were put off by Trump’s brutish language and libertine behavior. At the same time, however, Trump had made clear that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would likely overrule Roe v. Wade. If your overriding goal was banning abortion, voting for Trump while holding your nose was an instrumentally rational choice. That remained true in November 2020. By then, Trump had named three new justices who would ultimately cast decisive votes to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion, but the coup de grce would not be delivered until June 2022. |
| To be clear, I do not mean to excuse any votes for Trump, especially in 2024. Given Trump’s role in seeking to nullify an election both before and on January 6, 2021, and his campaign promise to use the levers of government power to exact retribution against his perceived political enemies, a 2024 vote for Trump was a vote against constitutional democracy. No set of policy preferences can justify such a vote. |
| However, for all of his flaws, Graham Platner is no Donald Trump. He is more like Bill Clinton, who was clearly guilty of infidelity and was credibly accused of more serious offenses than Platner has been. Even so, Democrats (including me) who were deeply disturbed by Clinton’s personal conduct rationally chose to vote for him given that his character flaws appeared to have little impact on his policies. |
| That is, admittedly, a low bar, but elections in a two-party system present a binary choice. As Donald Rumsfeld might have said, you go to the polls with the candidate you have, not the one you might want or wish to have. |
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